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  • Reading the primary literature, meaning research articles, is intimidating, confusing,

  • and seems out of reach for most people who aren't trained scientists.

  • But it doesn't have to be that way. Let's cover how to make reading research articles easy, fun, and approachable.

  • Dr. Jubbal, MedSchoolInsiders.com.

  • As Richard Feynman once said,

  • The first principle is that you must not fool yourselfand you are the easiest person to fool.”

  • We'll equip you with the tools and strategies to not be fooled with regards to scientific research moving forward.

  • As part of my neuroscience major in college,

  • we were required to read dozens of research articles related to the field.

  • We spent hours going over every single article, dissecting its strengths, weaknesses,

  • and working to accurately assess what value it provided to the scientific community.

  • Yet despite reading dozens of these neuroscience papers, when I entered medical school,

  • I still didn't enjoy reading the primary literature.

  • In fact, I avoided doing so unless absolutely necessary.

  • It wasn't until I began doing research of my own, read hundreds of papers,

  • and published dozens of my own that it all began to click.

  • Being able to understand and assess the scientific literature is so important

  • to parsing out the noise from the truth, but it doesn't have to take you years like it did for me.

  • When it comes to scientific studies, there are different levels of evidence.

  • Not all studies are created equal, and the study design is a big part of how strong the evidence is.

  • At the top, randomized controlled trials are the gold standard, the cream of the crop.

  • Below that, prospective cohort and case-control studies.

  • Prospective means you follow the subjects over time to see the outcomes of interest.

  • Third, we have retrospective cohort or case-control studies, meaning you already have the outcomes of interest,

  • but look back historically and make interpretations.

  • Fourth, we have case series and case reports, which are investigations into individual patient cases.

  • There are other levels, such as systematic reviews, meta-analyses, expert opinion, and others,

  • but for simplicity we'll stick to these four levels.

  • This ranking may not make sense just yet, and that's ok.

  • We'll now cover the elements of research, and how they apply to each type of research study,

  • and it will all begin to come together.

  • Epidemiology, coming from the Greek term epidēmia, translates to prevalence of disease.

  • It is the branch of medicine dealing with the incidence, distribution, and control of diseases.

  • If the primary aim of science is discovering the truth and determining cause and effect,

  • then it's important to note that most observational epidemiological studies cannot establish causality,

  • and therefore they cannot soundly accept or reject a hypothesis.

  • Strong correlations found in observational studies can be compelling enough to take seriously,

  • but there are limitations.

  • When it comes to observational studies, compared to experimental studies,

  • we have cohort, case-control, and cross sectional.

  • Without diving into the differences of each type of observational study,

  • understand this generally entails observing large groups of individuals

  • and recording their exposure to risk factors to find associations with possible causes of disease.

  • If they're retrospective,

  • they're looking back in time to identify particular characteristics associated with the outcome of interest.

  • These types of studies are prone to confounding and other biases, which will take us further from the truth.

  • We'll cover this in more detail shortly.

  • Prospective cohort studies recruit subjects and collect baseline information

  • before the subjects have developed the outcome of interest.

  • The advantage of prospective studies is they reduce several types of biases

  • which are commonplace in retrospective studies.

  • There are four steps to the scientific method:

  • First, make an observation.

  • Second, come up with a (falsifiable) hypothesis based on this observation.

  • Next, test the hypothesis through an experiment.

  • And last, accept or reject the hypothesis based on the experiment results.

  • To determine causality, meaning if some cause results in an effect, like whether or not red meat causes cancer,

  • the hypothesis must be adequately tested.

  • This is the part that is most commonly overlooked, particularly in disciplines such as nutrition,

  • because doing experiments necessary to establish causality presents several obstacles.

  • For this reason, many researchers turn to doing easier observational studies,

  • and I'm guilty of this too, but the problem is that most of these don't get us closer to the truth.

  • The gold standard for determining causality is a well designed randomized controlled trial, or RCT for short.

  • The researchers create inclusion and exclusion criteria to gather a group of subjects qualified for the study.

  • Then, they randomize subjects to two groups.

  • For example, one group receives drug A, and the other group receives placebo.

  • By randomly allocating participants into the treatment or control groups,

  • much of the bias from observational studies is substantially reduced.

  • In short, finding cause and effect becomes much easier.

  • If randomized controlled trials are so much better, then why aren't they always used?

  • First, they can be very expensive.

  • One report looking at all RCTs funded by the US National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke

  • found 28 trials with a total cost of $335 million.

  • Second, RCTs take a long time.

  • According to one study, the median time from start of enrollment to publication was 5 and a half years.

  • Third, not all RCTs are created equal, and it's quite challenging to conduct a high quality RCT.

  • These studies must have adequate randomization, stratification, blinding, sample size, power,

  • proper selection of endpoints, clearly defined selection criteria, and more.

  • Fourth, ethical considerations.

  • If you're assigning someone to be in the control or experimental group,

  • you can assign them to something you think will be helpful,

  • like a medication or other treatment, or not have an effect, like placebo or control group.

  • But you wouldn't be able to assign someone to a group that you would expect to harm them

  • can you imagine assigning some teenagers to smoke cigarettes and some not to?

  • This is a key distinction between RCTs and observational studies.

  • While RCTs seek to establish cause-and-effect relationship that are beneficial,

  • epidemiologists seek to establish associations that are harmful.

  • To better understand the strengths and weaknesses of any particular research study,

  • we'll need to explore statistics. Don't worry, we're gonna keep this basic, nothing too crazy.

  • Relative risk, in its simplest terms, is the relative difference in risk between two groups.

  • If a certain drug decreases the risk of colon cancer from 0.2% to 0.1%, that's a 50% relative risk reduction.

  • Decreasing the initial risk, .2%, by half, gives you a risk of .1%.

  • The actual change in the rate of the event occurring would be the absolute risk reduction,

  • which in this instance would be 0.1%, because .2 - .1 = .1.

  • The way most studies, and especially journalists,

  • summarize and report the results is through relative risk changes.

  • This is much more headline-worthy,

  • but obscures the truth where absolute risk would be more useful at communicating true impact.

  • But what's more likely to get more clicks? “New drug reduces colon cancer risk by 50%!”

  • Again, that would be relative risk reduction.

  • Alternatively, “New drug reduces colon cancer risk from 2 per 1000 to 1 per 1000”.

  • That would be absolute risk reduction.

  • In the world of research, a bias is anything that causes false conclusions and is potentially misleading.

  • Let's start with one of the biggest offenders: confounding.

  • A confounding variable is one that influences both the independent and dependent variables,

  • but wasn't accounted for in the study.

  • For example, let's say we're studying the correlation between bicycling and the sale of ice-cream.

  • As the bicycling rate increases, so does the sale of ice cream.

  • The researchers conclude that bicycling causes people to consume ice cream.

  • The third variable, weather, confounds the relationship between bicycling and ice cream,

  • as when it's hot outside, people are more likely to bicycle and also more likely to eat ice cream.

  • Another bias that isn't properly appreciated, particularly in the world of nutrition, is the healthy user bias.

  • Health-conscious people are more likely to do certain activities.

  • For example, most health-conscious people have heard that red meat is bad,

  • and therefore they're less likely to eat red meat.

  • People who eat more red meat are usually less health-conscious,

  • and therefore are also more likely to smoke, not exercise, and consume soft drinks.

  • Therefore, when an observational study comes out comparing those who eat red meat to those who don't,

  • we cannot actually conclude it's due to the red meat and not these other factors.

  • Even when researchers are aware of these factors, they are virtually impossible to properly account for.

  • Selection bias refers to the study population not being representative of the target population,

  • usually due to errors in selection of subjects into a study, or the likelihood of them staying in the study.

  • In the lost to follow-up bias, researchers are unable to follow up with certain subjects,

  • so they don't know what happened to them, such as whether or not they developed the outcome of interest.

  • This leads to a selection bias when the loss to follow up

  • is not the same across the exposed and unexposed groups.

  • There are many other biases, but we don't have time to explore each and every one here.

  • Good research minimizes the effects of confounding and biases. How do we do that?

  • Randomization is a method where study participants are randomly assigned to a treatment or control group.

  • Randomization is a key part in being able to distinguish cause and effect,

  • as proper randomization eliminates confounding.

  • You cannot do this in observational studies, as subjects self-select themselves into whichever group.

  • When confounding variables are inevitably present,

  • there are statistical methods tocontroloradjust forthem.

  • The two are stratification and multivariate models.

  • Stratification fixes the level of the confounders and produces subgroups within which the confounder does not vary.

  • This allows for evaluation of the exposure-outcome association within each stratum of the confounder.

  • This works because the confounder does not vary across the exposure-outcome in each level.

  • Multivariate models are better at controlling for greater number of confounders.

  • There are various types, one of the most common of which is linear regression.

  • In its simplest terms, regression is fitting the best straight line to a dataset.

  • Think back to algebra and y = mx + b.

  • We're trying to find the equation that best predicts the linear relationship between the observed data,

  • being y, and the experimental variable, being x.

  • Logistical regression deals with more complex relationships with multiple continuous variables.

  • The important thing to note is that confounding often still persists, even after adjustment.

  • There are almost an infinite number of possibilities that can confound an observation,

  • but researchers can only eliminate or control for the ones that they are aware of.

  • Alex Reinhart, author of Statistics Done Wrong, points out that it's common to interpret results by saying,

  • If weight increases by one pound, with all other variables held constant,

  • then heart attack rates increase by X percent.

  • You can quote the numbers from the regression equation,

  • but in the real world, the process of gaining a pound of weight also involves other changes.

  • Nobody ever gains a pound with all other variables held constant,

  • so your regression equation doesn't translate to reality.”

  • Because confounding is such a central limitation to observational research,

  • we must be careful when drawing conclusions from these types of studies.

  • With observational epidemiology, it's incredibly difficult to prove an association right or wrong.

  • While a small minority of these associations may be causal, the overwhelming majority are not.

  • And therefore, we should err on the side of skepticism.

  • When you propose a hypothesis in a research study, there are two forms:

  • the null hypothesis, meaning there is no relationship between the two phenomena,

  • and the alternative hypothesis, meaning there is a relationship.

  • The study seeks to provide data to suggest one over the othernote that science does not prove things,

  • as you could in math, but rather provides evidence for or against.

  • The /p/-value is the scoring metric that makes the final call.

  • It's the probability of obtaining these test results from chance alone, assuming the null hypothesis is correct.

  • In other words, it's the likelihood that no relationship exists, but the findings occurred due to chance alone.

  • A smaller /p/-value more strongly rejects a null hypothesis.

  • A larger /p/-value means a larger chance that the effect you are seeing is due to chance,

  • thus supporting the null hypothesis.

  • The /p/-value cutoff is assigned by the researchers to determine the cutoff at which statistical significance is achieved.

  • We call this number α, and it is usually set to 0.05, meaning 5%, or sometimes lower.

  • If the /p/-value is less than 0.05, we say the results arestatistically significant,”

  • and the null hypothesis is rejected.

  • There is a chance we are wrong, and we have terms for this, too.

  • When there's no true effect, but we think there is, we call this a false positive, or a Type I error.

  • We failed to reject the null hypothesis even when it was true.

  • The opposite, where there is an effect but we think there isn't, is called a Type II error.

  • We accepted the null hypothesis when we shouldn't have.

  • The chance of committing a Type II error is called β.

  • Statistical power is the probability that a study will correctly find a real effect, meaning a true positive.

  • This translates to Power = 1 - β. Power is influenced by four factors:

  • The probability of a false positive, which is α, or the Type I error rate.

  • The sample size (N), the effect size, meaning the magnitude of difference between groups.

  • And the probability of a false negative also called β or the Type II error rate.

  • Keep this in mind, as we'll be coming back to it.

  • A corollary to /p/-values are confidence intervals.

  • To find the confidence interval, you take 1 - α, so if α is commonly set to 0.05,

  • the confidence interval would be 0.95, or 95%.

  • When reading a study, you can quickly determine if statistical significance was achieved by

  • whether or not the confidence intervals include the number 1.00.

  • If it's larger, like 1.05 - 1.27, then a positive association is present with statistical significance,

  • and if it's smaller, like 0.56 - 0.89, then a negative association is present with statistical significance.

  • Confidence intervals are commonly misunderstood. With a 95% confidence interval of 1.05 - 1.27,

  • this does not mean that we are 95% confident that the true value is between those two numbers.

  • Rather, if we were to take 100 different samples and compute a 95% confidence interval for each sample,

  • then 95 of the 100 confidence intervals would contain the true value.

  • In other words, a 95% confidence interval states that 95% of experiments conducted in this exact manner

  • will include the true value, but 5% will not.

  • Lastly, let's clarify statistical significance versus practical significance.

  • A study can find statistical significance but have no practical significance.

  • This is more common than you think. A common case where this happens is when the sample size is too large.

  • The larger the sample size, the greater the probability that the study will reach statistical significance.

  • At these extremes, even minute differences in outcomes can be statistically significant.

  • If a study finds that a new intervention reduces weight by 0.5 pounds, who cares? It's not clinically relevant.

  • The reverse is also true, where a study demonstrates practical significance,

  • yet was unable to achieve statistical significance.

  • If we revisit the four factors that influence power,

  • we see that sample size is the most easily manipulated to over- or underpower a study.

  • Often times, observational studies are overpowered with thousands of subjects,

  • such that any minute difference may yield a statistically significant result.

  • Other studies experience the opposite, whereby they have a small number of subjects,

  • and even if there is a real difference, statistical significance cannot be demonstrated.

  • Each of these components in isolation isn't enough to make you an expert at deciphering research studies.

  • However, when you put each piece into context and understand the /why/ of how sound science is conducted,

  • you'll become far better equipped to think critically and make sense of the primary literature yourself,

  • without having to rely on lazy thinking and black and white summaries from journalists.

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  • Thank you all so much for watching.

  • This was an incredibly challenging video to make,

  • as there's so much to research and it was just challenging to fit it all in a single video.

  • Big shout out to Peter Attia's Nerd Safari series which was the inspiration and foundation for this video.

  • If you liked this video, let us know with a thumbs up

  • to keep the YouTube gods happy.

  • Much love to you all,

  • and I will see you guys in that next one.

Reading the primary literature, meaning research articles, is intimidating, confusing,

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